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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (479556)	10/21/2003 6:45:36 PM
From: Bald Eagle	Respond to of 769667

RE: Message 19421561 and Doesn't matter if you believe me or not. I did write the "double" part. So , you now admit that you flat out lied .. LOL. You're a waste of space and breathing oxygen too!

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (479556)	10/21/2003 7:31:05 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

kenny, can you see the connection???? Author Miniter Faults Gore and Jeffords for Botching 9/11 Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2003 WASHINGTON – Al Gore and Sen. Jim Jeffords are largely to blame for the slow start of the Bush administration’s security team before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Moreover, the president has good cause to be wary of the Clinton holdover who runs the CIA. Richard Miniter, author of the book “Losing bin Laden,” does not make this case in those exact words, but that is the essence of his message on where the fault lies in lack of preparedness for the aircraft-turned-bombs that brought down the World Trade Center towers, rammed into the Pentagon and went down in Pennsylvania. Gore’s refusal to concede his loss in Florida in 2000 “severely truncated the presidential transition,” the author and investigative journalist said at a meeting Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation. “So that the Bush people didn’t even know who they were going to name in certain spots in their national security apparatus. They were mostly empty boxes on an organizational chart,” he said. It did not help, of course that lame duck Bill Clinton refused to allow the Bush transition team access to federal facilities normally available to an incoming president until Gore’s five-week foot-dragging attempt to steal the election had been stopped. This followed a Clinton pattern of indifference to the terrorist threat that is documented in Miniter’s book, including his rebuffs of offers of help to get arch-terrorist bin Laden, first reported more than a year ago by NewsMax.com’s Carl Limbacher. “And then we had some guy named Jim Jeffords who decided he wanted to be independent of the Republicans and handed the Senate to the Democrats,” Miniter noted. What that meant in practical terms, he explained, was that “all the national security jobs that we could expect to be confirmed within a month to six weeks by a Republican Senate, would take six or eight months in a Democratic Senate, and maybe not be confirmed at all.” Meanwhile, Clinton holdovers were not enamored with the new attitude of retaliation against those who attack us. Through bureaucratic gimmicks, they were able to gum up the works as long as they remained in place. Miniter believes that is one reason George Tenet was kept on at the CIA, because “the Bush people could not get their man confirmed as CIA director on a timely basis. Remember that the [new] FBI director [Robert Mueller] was put into his job only a week before 9/11.” A vacant CIA director’s office was not a practical option. Given Tenet’s role in the Clinton administration's timidity in going after bin Laden, NewsMax.com asked Miniter if that made Tenet a weak link in President Bush’s national security team. “I don’t want to identify anyone in a time of war as a weak link,” the investigating author replied. Then he went on to say if Bush were to seek his advice on Tenet, he would suggest that there might be a problem there. Though Miniter says it’s true that Tenet was politically savvy in paying due respect to the elder Bush as a former fellow DCI, that wasn’t what kept the Clinton holdover in office. Rather, it was the Bush father-and-son conviction that the DCI should be nonpartisan, a point that Gerald Ford-appointed CIA Director George H.W. Bush tried to impress on incoming President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. Carter’s cold reply was that the position was in fact political because Bush had formerly headed the Republican National Committee. Miniter says Americans have a crucial choice to make “in a little more than a year from now.” They must decide whether America is going to stand up for itself when Americans are killed by foreign attackers, a policy dating back to the attack on the Maine (Spanish-American War), the sinking of the Lusitania (World War I), and the attack on Pearl Harbor (World War II) or, go back to the Clinton-style approach of ignoring attacks on Americans. Fifty-nine American lives were lost in terrorist attacks on Clinton’s watch, and he turned his back on them and their families. By contrast, Miniter understands President Bush keeps a big sheet in his desk drawer with photos and names of the world’s most dangerous American-hating terrorists. With each one that is killed or captured, he scrawls a big X over the photo. It is not unusual for the president, while meeting with security advisers, to pull out the big sheet, point to someone without a red X over it, and say, “Now, what about that guy?” The American people, says the author of “Losing bin Laden,” will decide next year whether they want to be protected, in keeping with the No. 1 duty of the U.S. government to “preserve and protect.” newsmax.com